Around the World

Posted: December 29th, 2010 | Author: OSS Team | Filed under: Around the World | Tags: , , , , | No Comments »

ITP.net…

Saudi Must Expand Data, Content Services: Report

According to a recent report by Informa Telecoms and Media, Saudi Arabia should investigate growth opportunities in data and content services following the country’s strong growth in mobile voice services.  There is significant potential for these advanced offerings because of the country’s lack of many broadband options and its young population who wants to have on-the-go access to social networking applications and entertainment.  Operators in the region are betting their futures on this growth—one is expecting mobile broadband to account for 37% of its revenue by 2014, while another is planning to expand its data, content and mobile broadband applications to draw 20% to 30% of its revenue.

SearchTelecom.com…

WiMAX and LTE: Sometimes Complementary, Not Competitive

U.S. wireless carriers pit WiMAX and Long-Term Evolution (LTE) against each other as competing technologies.  But in other regions, operators are deploying them as complementary technologies for specific applications and markets.  Richard Webb, directing analyst at Infonetics Research, notes that “in [other parts] of the world, WiMAX is much more of a niche technology…and therefore [it is] much less of a threat.  Mobile operators [across the globe] are much more open to looking at ways they can [deploy] WiMAX [rather than hold] back the threat of it…which is the attitude of [U.S. carriers] Verizon Wireless and AT&T.”  Although co-existence is unlikely in the U.S., WiMAX may come to play a supporting role for operators whose choice of technology doesn’t wholly define their market identity; this might be, for example, smaller wireless carriers using the technology to support smart grids or M2M.  But Webb believes WiMAX will not be “front and centre” for them.

Billing & OSS World…

BSS/OSS Transformation Key to Asia

Asia-Pacific CSPs are experiencing a changed market landscape to say the least—falling average revenue per user (ARPU) for voice, increasing demand for mobile Internet, convergence everywhere (network, services, devices and industries) and intense competition are necessitating operational efficiency, combined with innovation in rolling out new data services.  New research from Frost & Sullivan reveals that the shift to customer-centric organizations in this region and the exponential increase in demand for data services is causing operators to optimize and transform their networks.  Supporting this shift are OSS/BSS solutions.  Analyst Vikas Chanani believes the building blocks that must be part of every customer-centric and business transformation strategy going ahead in the future are unified real-time rating and charging, integrated network management, data analytics, and business intelligence and customer experience management.  Do you see these for being crucial for APAC operators?  What building blocks would you add or take from this list?t


OSS/BSS World Summit in London, 8-9 September

Posted: September 10th, 2010 | Author: Bob Machin | Filed under: Events | Tags: , , , , , | No Comments »

This week, OSS/BSS World hosted a conference in the Park Lane Hotel, London. I went along for Comptel, and here, pretty much as I wrote them, are my notes from the two days.

Overall Thoughts

Well-attended and heavily-sponsored conference, indicating that OSS and BSS are still hot topics in the industry. Good mix of operators, SIs and many hardware and software vendors. Full agenda (somewhat weighted to the BSS side ) with speakers limited to 20- or 25-minute slots for presentations and questions—an increasingly common (and welcome) approach at conferences. Contributions from the floor seemed to me to be relatively few; after the first three keynote presentations, there had been no questions at all. Perhaps we’re at a stage where everyone understands the big themes and is really looking for solid, proven business cases and answers. I suspect that the audience may have been looking for validation of ideas that are already well-grounded about future developments in the industry; if so, they are not likely to have been disappointed.

Themes

Common themes which prevailed across the two days included:

  • Customer experience, and focusing on the key points of customer interaction (referenced by Lois Kraus of AT&T as LB-GUPS, or Learn, Buy, Get, Use, Pay, Service, an acronym which even she didn’t seem very keen on). The frequency of new service rollout is making it harder than ever to keep on top of the customer experience. Customer data (and understanding) was regularly referenced as a key differentiator for telcos and potentially a secondary asset which could be exploited more effectively in relationships with partners. Customer retention strategy was acknowledged as more important than acquisition strategy by Emtel of Mauritius.
  • Cloud services: many of the questions which arose were of the ‘what difference will Cloud make to this?’ variety. From the platform, the general take was that Cloud was a different world—with great revenue potential but also putting very different demands on carriers. George Nazi of BT Group (President, 21CN, Global Networks and Computing Infrastructure) believed carriers saw it as their ‘single biggest strategic challenge’ but was bullish about its potential and viability. AT&T, when asked about whether its OSS/BSS platform (developed to be universal for all services) would support Cloud, stated that yes, initially it would be used, but later expressed doubt that that approach would be sustainable and suspected that the Cloud business would eventually need its own support. The idea of using Cloud services to support their own businesses (using remote infrastructure and storage as a service, for example) is already prevalent among new ’agile’ communications players.
  • Services environment complexity and how it should be handled. Convergence, transformation and consolidation were regularly referenced, as were issues around legacy IT and services and the challenges of migrating these to new platforms (it seems that some problems will always be with us). ‘Transformation’, in particular, was addressed almost as a desirable end in its own right by several speakers (particularly those with SI interests) although the nature and objectives of any transformation could naturally vary greatly. HP cited consolidation and cost reduction, customer experience improvement and the shift to new business models as common objectives of transformation exercises. At a higher level, ‘transformation’ was positioned as a key enabler of an almost philosophical shift in the business—from ‘technology to business’ (look out for T2B as an emerging acronym) and from ‘survive to thrive’. SDPs continue to be popular as a means to open up the service environment to third-party providers and developers. Telefonica are vigorous proponents of this approach and claim to have reduced service rollout time from 6-12 months to 6-12 weeks (quoted by Capgemini).
  • Revenue challenges, particularly arising from the ‘data crunch’. The end of flat-rate charging was regularly cited but with few firm theories about how variable charging would play. Orga recited what is fast becoming the industry mantra on real-time charging and policy control as the twin levers of power.
  • Machine-to-machine communications and other plays on connected devices, though with little firm opinion of the impact of this on carriers. This was part of a broader theme, however, that ‘communications services’ weren’t dead, that we would see interesting things emerge in the next few years (from the interconnection of devices, in particular) and that carriers, as masters of networks and conmmunications, had a big part to play in the transformation of society which this would drive. As Paulo Collela of Ericsson opined, CSPs should not resign themselves to just being enablers for new players, but should look for ways to be significant agents of change themselves. On day two, Sanjay Mewada of Netcracker spoke on the value of machine-to-machine communications, valuing this as already a $14 billion business—but significantly, he included handset-to-machine transactions, or mobile payments, in his definition of M2M.